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Years ago an old friend, now deceased, was ordained a priest and joined
a new community in the Midwest. My friend was homosexual, and it
slowly dawned on me, on a visit out there, that the other priests in the
house seemed to be gay, too. So was the local bishop, according to the
clerical grapevine.

I wish I could say I was overcome by an intense
desire to figure out what was going on, but I wasn't. We pushed these
things out of our minds in those days. Sample questions I could have
asked my friend but didn't: Will straight priests feel welcome in this
house, and if not, wasn't this place going to be a gay institution? What
would that mean? And, what are the chances that a houseful of
like-minded, high-energy, homosexual men would remain celibate? If
they were sexually active, didn't this make them hypocrites, committing
themselves publicly to a rule they were all ignoring?

Good
questions,
finally being
asked
throughout
the Catholic
Church as
new
allegations
continue to
surface. The
latest
charge of
abuse was
leveled at
Archbishop
Rembert
Weakland of
Milwaukee
last week. As the battle lines are now drawn, one side
says that sexually active gay priests are a small percentage of the
clergy, perhaps only 10 percent. The other side says the church has a
severe long-term problem with a powerful "lavender mafia" of gay priests
and bishops that controls many seminaries and undermines the integrity
of the church by encouraging what the church forbids.

Intentionally or not, the argument goes, this gay culture discourages
straight recruits to the priesthood and gradually makes the clergy more
heavily homosexual.

Bishop Wilton Gregory, the current head of the U.S. Conference of
Catholic Bishops, this year said, "It's an ongoing struggle to make sure
the Catholic priesthood is not dominated by homosexual men."
Apprehension about gay domination of the church is now a top-level
concern? Ordinary Catholics hadn't been told.

Yielding to temptation. Still, it isn't exactly fresh news. The last
cardinal in Boston, Humberto S. Medeiros, warned the Vatican in 1979
that a sharp increase in the number of gay seminarians meant a decline
in straight seminarians. He said, "Where large numbers of homosexuals
are present in a seminary, other homosexuals are quickly attracted."
Straight applicants, he said, "tend to be repelled." Jason Berry's 1992
book about sex abuse by priests, Lead Us Not Into Temptation, talked
about gay priests who would visit seminaries "on the make," befriend
high school students, go to gay bars, and have sex in public toilets or
parks."

Purchasing this book-- linked at right -- helps fund JWR

A new book out this week, Michael S. Rose's Goodbye, Good
Men: How Liberals Brought Corruption Into the Catholic Church , is filled
with stories about seminarians who shower in couples, sashay through
the halls in pink outfits, and talk about their many affairs as "growth
experiences." Rose reports that straight seminarians are harassed or
forced into sexual situations and, in one case, given this item on a
questionnaire: "What would you rather do: masturbate or read
pornography?"

Not all gay priests are part of this flamboyant and active gay subculture.
A majority aren't. But the subculture has many serious negative effects,
eroding morale and confidence in the church. How serious can this
church be if it condones sex in its seminaries?

The not-so-subliminal message was that rules aren't very important. The
celibacy rule and the ban on nonmarital sex will change eventually, the
argument went-we are just a bit ahead of the curve. Another argument is
that sex has nothing to do with morality: Sex is just a bodily function,
while morality is about love and social justice.

The rise of the sexually active gay subculture among the clergy didn't
cause the horrors of priestly sex abuse. The vast majority of gay priests
would never prey on the young. But did the subculture play the role of
enabler in the scandals? I think it did, expanding tolerance for the
forbidden and generating a sense of futility among the rule-keepers.
Self-deception is infinitely expandable. One man's justification for
violating celibacy or the ban on nonmarital sex is another man's
justification for "intergenerational love," formerly child rape.

The way out for the church is not to hunt down and expel every last gay
priest, which would be impossible anyway. But it should restore the
pressures to keep priests, gay and straight, from acting out sexually,
whether by showering with a mature friend or preying on a child. The key
principles are easily learned: Maybe celibacy will be changed some day,
but if you make a vow to stay celibate, you ought to keep your word.
And in the seminaries, Catholic sexual morality should be taught by
people who actually believe it. Is this controversial?